Wait a Bit
by xxpoisonivyxx
Summary: Life is in the little moments. [Squall. Yuffie. And sometimes things never change]


**Wait a Bit**

_as if she ever will--_

They're too different to ever really be friends but sometimes Yuffie gets up the courage to hug him goodnight and sometimes he's in a good enough of a mood to make her toast for breakfast, just the way she likes it, peanut butter on one side and butter on the other, and sometimes he even includes the happy face in jam. She thinks that maybe this is good enough.

--

She's the one who invents bungee jumping sawing, and after that time that involved Sora, a cracked head, a pretty fast Potion from Aerith and a miscalculated bungee cord, she's banned from the restoration site forevermore. But she's in there all the time anyways, messing up his plans, drawing little stupid comics on his blueprints. He's somehow come to expect opening his lunch and finding _HAVE A NICE DAY SQUALL YOU STUPID ASSHOLE_ written on the paper in magic marker.

--

He's got this picture under his pillow. He's with a bunch of his old friends and they're all smiling and happy—even Squall. She takes it out sometimes when he's not around and remembers them all, laughing Zell, hyper Selphie, even the girl who he has his arm around. He's smiling for that girl in the picture, she can tell, and that just makes her want him to smile just because.

--

He hates the nights where she gets to cook because the food will be _so gross_. He'll complain the entire time, but he'll eat it nevertheless.

--

Her membership card has flowers and stars and Heartless and THIS IS DINKY scrawled onto it, but she always has it with her, and that's the important part.

--

She drags him out at 3 am to look at the stars and the moon and she'll want to talk to him about the different worlds and keyblades, and all he'll really want to do is sleep. She pokes him awake with his gunblade and then rambles on and on and on and somewhere in the middle of that he'll fall asleep again. And somewhere in the middle of _that_, she'll nod off, and he'll have to wake up before the Heartless get there and drag her home again.

--

She's the one that goes chasing after him when he's buried the in computer room or the restoration site or just somewhere else, she's the only one that gets to call him Squall without him shutting down for days (mostly because he doesn't take her seriously) and she's the one that covers his back.

­_Great Ninja Yuffie to the rescue!_ She'll scream, waving that shuriken bigger than her and cleaving through the enemies like they were nothing and he were a silly little girl, and he thinks that the embarrassment of that is almost enough to make him wish he got taken by the Heartless.

--

She has him twisted around her little finger, even though she doesn't know it. Everyone else does though. The one time Yuffie got sick and they left Leon in charge they returned to find him dressed in Cloud's pink dress and singing a bad pop song and six-year old Yuffie giggling and happy.

--

Sometimes they laugh and sometimes they cry and sometimes they even dance, but it's Yuffie, it's all Yuffie who does all three, all at the same time, while he watches and makes a sarcastic comment and she trips over her own feet. (She thinks that life is beautiful sometimes and he thinks that life is crap sometimes but the important part is that they think life is, and they think it _together_)

--

She holds his hand when they run because he's too slow and she's too fast and she's not about to lose him, never never never, and sometimes she forgets to let go and sometimes he doesn't let her let go and sometimes she can forget she's unhappy.

--

It's not perfect, nothing is, he's looking for his angel and she's looking for him, but somehow they make it work. They're partners. They have a _really cool_ secret handshake that involves a birdcall, an explosion noise and impromptu dancing, even though he never wants to perform it in public. He thinks it's the stupidest and longest thing ever, but still has every step memorized. _In case we ever get separated_, she explains, holding out her hand one more time, _so we can recognize each other by._

He snorts. _As if I'm ever going to forget you but remember this stupid thing_ but shakes her hand nonetheless.

--

Aerith is like her mother and Cid is like this big crazy scary train thing with smoke and fire and angry (Aerith says that this is only because she taunts him, but Yuffie _hates_ being saved by Cid's stupid space program, and is determined to make him regret taking her along every minute of every day), and Cloud is just Cloud, except for sometimes he's not. Sometimes he's deeply buried within himself and she hates talking to him then because talking to him then is like talking to the past, to the dead, and she _hates_ that. When he's normal though, he's like this stupid big brother and has moments of dumbness wherein he noogies her really hard and has moments of deepness reminiscent of why she liked him the first place.

Squall is like this broken piece of pretty flower 'cause he's delicately girly like that, and also because broken pieces of pretty flower are _sad_.

--

She crawls into his bed when she has nightmares, and he lets her. She steals his blanket and takes up all the room and snores like a bear until he elbows her in the head _hard_, and then she just pretends to snore to spite him, but she always feels better in the end.

It's not perfect, and it never will be, he's cold and unforgiving, and she's the exact opposite, and she thinks that she loves him more than he'll ever lover her, and he knows that she's too blind to ever see the truth, but it's in the little moments—_life's_ in the little moments, and that's enough.

--

One last thing:

She's rushing home with ash smudged onto her cheek, really late because she stopped by to antagonize Cid and got something blown up in her face as thanks and spent the better part of the hour cleaning herself up, and she's hungry and hoping Cloud isn't too mad and that Aerith won't do her quiet disappointed thing, and she has a vague suspicion that she missed a spot of ash somewhere.

Leon is waiting for her in the marketplace, not really looking at anything but the sunset, and she sneaks up on him with her super ninja skills and pushes him forward, because sitting still is a stupid thing to waste time on.

"You have ash on your cheek," he says by way of greeting and smears it around with his thumb. She pulls one of her horrendous faces at him, the ones where Tifa says one good smack and it'll stick like that, but she doesn't mind because it'd be pretty cool to have her face able to frighten anyone, and he gets up slowly, but in one fluid movement, and picks up his gunblade.

"What're you waiting for anyways?" she asks grumpily, rubbing at her cheek where the ash is (and missing).

He turns and smiles at her and she bottles it and keeps it deep inside her where her precious things are (along with Aerith's smell and Tifa's cooking and Cid's laughter and Cloud's retardiosity and Sora's brightness, and just—everything about Squall).

"For you," he says, and Yuffie knows that somehow, they are on the road to being happy.

**Squall. Yuffie. Life is in little moments, and sometimes, so is happiness.**


End file.
